Archive of Tips and Tricks

Hey there Wufoo fans! Now as most of you know, you can collect payments with Wufoo forms. But did you know that you’re not just limited to one time payments? With Wufoo, you have the option of collecting recurring payments as well. That’s right, we’re just that cool.

But what if you want to collect both recurring and one time payments for the same form? That’s where it can get a bit tricky. With our current integration, it’s not possible to collect both types of payments on the same form.

Lucky for you though, we’re form experts over here. We’ll show you how to do this using three forms (it’s not bad, I promise) while making it seamlessly look like a single form to your users.

You’ll accomplish this thanks to a landing page.

Step 1: Create your 3 Forms

So, just so we can paint a clear picture—let’s say you’re collecting donations for your non-profit organization. You want to give your donors the option of either making a one time donation or making recurring donations. The first thing you’ll do is create your landing page form with that one question:

Now you’ll want to create two separate additional forms: one form for the one time donations and one form for the recurring donations.

Pro tip: if you need to collect all the same info on the forms, consider creating one and then duplicating it to create the second. You’ll cut down on your form building time.

Step 2: Connect the forms

To seamlessly connect these forms, we’ll visit our lovely friends, the Form Rules. Specifically, we’ll set up a couple redirects on our landing page form to take the user to payment forms.

And you’re all set—you can start collecting donations.

But wait a minute…we forgot a little something.

Step 3: Setting up Payment Integration

You can’t really collect donations without Payment Integration, now can you? Well here’s how you’ll do that. Since the landing page form just sends the person to a separate form, you can leave that form’s Payment Integration alone. But you will need to set that up for both the recurring donation form and the one time donation form.

For the one time donation form — You can set up this Payment Integration just like any other one time payment form. Select your merchant, edit your settings, and add the donation price field to your Assign Prices section. All our merchants (except Chargify) will let you collect one time payments.

Next step? You’ll set that up for the recurring donation form with one of our recurring payment merchants—there are three to choose from:

To make things easy on yourself, we recommend using Stripe or PayPal Standard. Since you can collect recurring payments and one-time payments with the same merchant account, this will allow you to keep all donation in one merchant account.

Just like that, you’ve got a landing page form to help you collect both recurring and one-time donations. For those people filling out your form, it will appear as if it’s one seamless form.

We loooove videos here at Wufoo and of course, we love how-to videos especially. Who doesn’t love to learn, eh?

So getting back to basics a bit, our resident Martin Scorsese, Kane, has created yet another screencast on the fly for you on our favorite thing ever—form-building. Last time, he went through a quick dive, this time he’s going in even deeper.

If you want to see who has filled out your form, you can simply ask for a few bits of information from your users, such as their name and email address.

Let’s say you already have that information though. It’s not particularly helpful to ask for information you already know, so it would be fantastic if you could track exactly who’s filled out your form without having to ask for it. Fortunately, with the help of our survey creating cousins, SurveyMonkey, there’s a rather cheeky way to get this done.

This lets you send your surveys to a specific email list and track exactly who’s responded. We’ll go through how to embed a Wufoo form into SurveyMonkey so you can track who has filled out your forms through their email collector.

To kick things off, we’ll need to create our survey in SurveyMonkey. If you don’t have an account with them, check out their plans and prices. Once you’re signed in, click +Create Survey to get started. They give you options to use a template or copy an existing survey, but we’ll create one from scratch.

Once the survey has been created, you’ll notice it doesn’t look too different from Wufoo. You can create a survey using the different methods on the left side of the page. If you click Builder you can start adding questions to the survey.

We’re not too interested in adding many questions. Our interest lies in wanting to embed our Wufoo form into the survey. To do that, add a Text question. Once you’ve done that, you’ll notice a very mini video camera on the question. Give that a click and then click Embed. It’s here where you’ll put the iFrame embed code from your Wufoo form.

That can be found in the share section within Wufoo. Save when you’ve done that and you’ve created your survey. Easy as pie! Feel free to change the look and feel of the survey through their Themes tab. Otherwise, we’re ready to share.

To set up the email collector, click the Collect Responses tab in the top right corner of the page. Then choose the Email collector. It’s all mega straight forward from here. You can manually add your recipients at the top of your page, or click +Add Recipients to upload your own email list from your email client.

You can also change the subject of your initial email and edit the body of the email as well. Then just click Next and follow along until you can send the email. Once it’s sent, you’re all sorted. Each person will now receive an email asking them to fill out your form.

At any point, you can check your SurveyMonkey account to see who has replied to the survey and who hasn’t. You can even send reminder emails to the people that haven’t replied yet. Pretty nifty stuff.

When you view the survey, the form will be nice and comfy inside of the survey. It’s easy to fill out the form and simply click Done on the survey to complete the process.

We hope this trick is helpful! Questions for Kane? You know where to go.

Fall is just around the corner and you know what that means, form fans. Yep—-it’s back to school season! We’re big supporters of all things academics at Wufoo and if we can make your lives as educators a little bit easier? Well, then A pluses for everyone because that’s our goal.

And as just a small token of our huge gratitude to all of you, we’ve compiled a shortlist of top educational templates designed to make your life in the classroom easier.

So get this—there are over 300 templates that you can pick from. And now that our Template Gallery is totally revamped and lovely to look at, that’s the best place to go when you’re just starting out.

We don’t doubt your form-building skills, but we know sometimes you’re in a hurry and need forms fast. With these templates, we’ve covered the first few steps, so you can do just that and get back to teaching.

Grades. It’s one of the few unchanging things about at teacher’s working life. You need to keep track of how everyone’s doing and this can sometimes mean a lot of busywork.

Rather than (gasp!) writing down grades into an actual gradebook or entering them into Excel, why not go with an online form instead? This will save you time and allow for easy filtering and tracking of the data once it’s in the Entry Manager.

Emergencies sometimes happen. And when they do, you want to be prepared. This template has pre-made fields for names, email, phone, address, and just about everything you’ll need to contact a guardian in the event of an emergency.

Save on some paper by giving all your quizzes online. These are quick, fast, and your students can’t pretend the dog ate their homework.

Now, you might be thinking that these particular templates seem more suited for elementary, middle, and high school…but that’s not all we have available so no worries. For the college and upper level educators out there, here are a few templates to make your classroom life feel less hectic.

Any college will have some great guest lectures and seminars, but since they’re not part of the standard curriculum, you’ll definitely want to document all of them. This will help keep track of all your visiting profs giving those awesome seminars.

Don’t know about you but changing majors in college happened pretty frequently so it would’ve been nice to have a quick and easy online form to do that in a snap. Well? Try this out and we bet your students will thank you (and the Admissions department too).

We know the school year may just be beginning for most students, but for those high school seniors planning ahead, college application time will come around sooner than about time for those college applications. Paper applications just aren’t the way to go anymore. They take a long time, they might get lost in the mail, etc. Online applications are super fast, they’re a cinch to evaluate and help keep things organized.

And there you have it, dear educators. Hours of work saved by using templates. Spiff it up with one of our themes and then be sure to clear some space on your desk—you’re about to get a ton of apples from some happy students.

Questions for Nicola? Let her know in the Comments below, we check daily!

You’ve set up an awesome, fun, and extremely dangerous event. You want everyone you know to participate, but you don’t want to shoulder this massive liability (smart thinkin’!)—enter the waiver form.

A waiver is a document that illustrates an individual’s surrender of particular rights. Similar to a disclaimer, waivers are a complex document and they shouldn’t be taken lightly. Talk to your lawyer when drafting a waiver. We’re not lawyers so don’t assume any of our examples here represents legal advice in any shape or form. Got it? Good. Let’s get to building a form then, eh?

When signing a waiver, it’s important to include a copy for your terms and the rights that the individual is surrendering when they sign. Generally, we would suggest using a Section Break field for this. Section Break fields let you include text or HTML without adding an extra input field to your form. An unfortunate side-effect of using a Section Break on a waiver form is that the text you include won’t be sent along to your user, and won’t be included in the Notifications you receive.

To make sure you and your users get a copy of the waiver for both of your records, we suggest using our CSS keyword cloak. Cloak is and often misunderstood CSS Keyword. “Hide an input field?! Why would I want to do that on a form, y’all crazy”.

Well, sometimes yes. We’re going to use the CSS Keyword cloak to hide the input field for a regular old Single-Line-Text field. First, paste all that text you had in your Section Break over in the Field Label of a Single Line Text field. Once that’s done, add the CSS Layout Keyword cloak.

Field labels will always appear within the Notification emails, as long as that field’s input field contains data. To ensure it always contains data, add a bit of pre-defined text to that single line text field to ensure it shows up in every email. Since that field is hidden, your users won’t be able to see or change it. We usually use something like [placeholder] so it’s easy to identify. Another option is to simply include a period as the pre-defined value.

This will give you a section of static text without an input box, kinda like our Section Break. The text will be included in Notification emails, as well as within the Entry Manager.

To include a copy of that waiver for your users, click on the Form Settings tab, and enable your Confirmation Email. When customizing that email, check the Include copy of form data checkbox. Your customer will then receive a copy of the waiver and all of its juicy legal pitfalls.

That’s the gist of how to create a waiver form in Wufoo! Here’s the example we just created for your reference too.

But, wait. You don’t have enough entries. Ugh, how can this be?? Don’t worry, you’re of course not alone.

All of us share our forms to whatever channels make the most sense to us—whether it’s to our website, our company’s website or social media. How do we know when and what channels to use? And are we also using the channels the right way to get more form entries? Well, you’re in luck because that’s what this post is for, ladies and gents.

Let’s review—consider this a cheat sheet if you will, of form distribution channels at your fingertips. *Pro Tip: Not every channel in this cheat sheet is applicable to every type of form. In other words, treat this as a reference list only.

Email – An oldie but a goodie. One of the best ways to grab immediate attention to your form is by sharing the link in a personalized email to your friends and target audience in your contact list. As you share your form with your friends, make a subtle request to share your form with any email groups that they see fit. Additionally, if you are aware of targeted email groups that are closed for public access, reach out to your friends who are part of those groups and request them to post it on your behalf.

Messaging apps – Running a personal event? Organizing the company holiday party and need to get RSVPs faster? Look no further than the set of messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Each have a huge user base and chances are that most of your friends and colleagues use at least one of these apps.

Facebook – Facebook groups and Facebook business pages have recently taken over email groups. Are you part of a Facebook group with a large group of members? Do you or your friends own a Facebook page with a good number of followers? Consider posting in these groups or Facebook pages, just be sure your form’s purpose is relevant of course.

Twitter – The little blue bird is a great channel to promote your form. But before you do, conduct a quick analysis first on popular hashtags that are relevant to your form’s goal. For example, if you are running an event, look for hashtags relevant to local events that have a lot of posts in the recent past.
Use these hashtags in your tweet to get the most number of views for your tweet and your form. Before you tweet, reach out to friends in your network and request them to like and retweet your original tweet. Don’t be shy either. Post your tweet during different times of the day (8 a.m., 2 p.m., 8 p.m.) A lot of people tend to login to Twitter only during specific times of the day like say, on the commute home or when they first wake up. Posting multiple times a day gives your tweet a better chance of being viewed and even better, shared.

LinkedIn - LinkedIn groups are a great way to reach professional audience for lead gen campaigns and for promoting professional events. It’s usually a good idea to give out something (like a downloadable case study or a free e-book) to increase the chances of LinkedIn members filling out your form. Make sure groups and discussion forums are still active. Always read the group’s guidelines before you post your request. Some groups have explicit instructions to post such requests only under “promotions” category. Other groups frown upon such promotional posts altogether. Violating group principles is a great way to get banned from the group permanently—don’t be one of those guys. Learn more on how to share your forms on LinkedIn.

Influencers – One of the best ways to get a lot of entries is through influencer marketing. If you know of any major influencers in a niche within your network, request them to share your form link on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. When you make a request, give the influencer a strong reason to promote your form (for example—help out a charity group by promoting a charity event). Influencers are rare gems so you don’t want to reach out with trivial requests. Also, chances are your request will be promptly turned down or worse and far more likely, ignored.

Reddit – Reddit has become the go-to-place for a lot of readers for everything from getting latest news to reading content on topic of their choice like startups and marketing. Identify one or more channels that your target audience is likely to frequent. Never been on Reddit before? You need to “Karma” which is equivalent to credits, before you can start sharing posts of your own. Reddit clearly wants you to contribute to the community before you can reap the benefits. Reddit users also have the ability to “downvote” a post. So! Read the channel guidelines before you share a form to avoid being banned. As long as the form is relevant to the audience, you’re likely to get a good number of entries.

Be viral – Add a social sharing widget in the form’s end page (AKA Thank You page of your form) and encourage your users to share your form’s link. Often, users look forward to sharing with their friends and colleagues on social media that they’re attending an event immediately after they sign up. Enabling this possibility by embedding a social sharing widget would let users do the work for you and bring in more form entries. Here’s how you can add social media sharing options to your confirmation page.

Keep this cheat sheet by your side when you’re ready to share that sweet form of yours. We’ll update as we go too, promise!

Have your own best practices for each channel? Help out your fellow Wufoo form creators and leave a comment below.

The Max Quantities feature is one of our more recent releases and we reckon it’s a bit fantastic. It’s a nifty little one that allows you to limit the number of times an option can be picked in a form. If a customer is filling out a field with this applied, they’ll see exactly how many times that option can be picked. It’ll look a little bit like this:

Not too shabby, eh? However, not everyone would be a fan of showing how many t-shirts they have left. It’s not possible to directly get rid of the text showing this, but being the superhero that it is, CSS is around to save the day. With CSS it’s possible to target that piece of text, shoot it with some laser eyes and send it fleeing from the form. Or to avoid the action scene metaphor, it’s possible to hide it. The CSS is mega simple as well. Check it out:

Not a massive amount to talk about with that. The colour of the text has just been made transparent, which will make it disappear from the form. When applied, it’ll look like this:

Looks like CSS has defeated the villain with one swift and beautiful move. All of those options still have the max quantities applied, but only small shirts, which have run out of stock will show the amount remaining. That way the user isn’t a bit confused when they can’t pick the small shirt they so desperately want. The same fate would be in store for the other shirts, if they were to run out of stock.

What’s that? You want the text for out of stock options to be gone as well and you need CSS to cancel its holiday to help you again? That’s chill. Just add a tiny bit more CSS. Check it out:

You will notice when the option has been disabled and will once again hide the text from the form. When applied, it’ll look like this:

Choosing the right form link for you

Before you can share your form on LinkedIn, you’re gonna need a URL to link to your form (crazy, right?). On our Share page, you’ll find 2 types of links you can use to share your form directly. One is the title URL which is based on your form title and WILL change if you tweak your form title, so be careful.

The other is the permanent URL - this is a unique URL that stays the same even if you change the form title.

We recommend using the permanent URL to give you the most flexibility in case you feel like changing up your title. Any URLs you add to a LinkedIn update get shortened anyway, so we think a permanent URL is the way to go. To use either a permanent or title URL, click on the green Copy link button below the URL, and paste away.

Linking to your form on LinkedIn

Let’s say you’re hiring for a new position and you want to poll your connections for their best interviewing tips n’ tricks. One way to do that is to post a LinkedIn update with your form link. Head over to your LinkedIn homepage and click on Update status in the upper left.

Paste in your form link, add a witty caption, and let those responses come rolling in.

You can also share a form directly from your LinkedIn profile. Under the Summary tab, you can easily add a link to your form by clicking on the square icon in the upper right-hand corner.

Paste in your form URL, write a catchy description so people know what they’re looking at and boom—-you’ve got a form on your LinkedIn profile. You can also link to your form directly from one of your job descriptions using the same steps. Cool, eh?

Congrats, Newbies—you now you have one more social media channel in your form-sharing toolkit.

For more social media forms goodness, check out how to share your forms on Facebook and Twitter here. Form on!

Hey there, fellow dinosaurs. If you’re like me, you probably have a little too much money on your hands this time of year. But don’t worry at all: the IRS is here to help.

It’s open season on taxes here in the states, and Wufoo can help you keep track of all those expenses and receipts like a pro.

Oftentimes, we think of forms when we think of collecting information from someone else. Sometimes though, we can turn the lens around and use Wufoo to collect and organize details about ourselves!

If you’re a small business owner or independent contractor, you might want to keep your business expenses separate from your personal expenses. If you like to keep a personal budget, you can do that too. Here’s how we’ll do it.

First we’re going to want to make a form to collect all of those juicy details about our budget and personal spending.

The best way to do this is to consider this question: What do I buy? Everyone’s answer to this is going to be a bit different. Here’s what I came up with:

As you can see, I have all the important categories nailed down. Now let’s go build it! Head over to Wufoo, and create a new form. The most important bits of information I wanted to track are:

Type of expense

Price

Date of transaction

I’m going to use our Price field to track the cost of each expense. This will let me enter any amount I want, and track that number in the Entry Manager. To track each category of expense, I’ve used a Dropdown field. That way, I can come back later and add new Categories if I find they’re a bit lacking.

For those pesky paper receipts, you can use our File Upload field to upload a picture as soon as you get them by using your phone’s camera. In fact, I keep a bookmark to this form on my own personal device so I can log all of those expenses as soon as I make the purchase. Yes, I enjoy things like this.

If you’re eager to take this one step further, take a look at our Dropbox integration. With this integration, all of those receipts will end up in one folder in Dropbox. They’ll make for a very intriguing slideshow too, so be sure to share that folder with everyone you know! (Don’t actually do that, for friendship’s sake.)

Once you have all of your expenses tracked in Wufoo, it’s easy to use our Report Builder to visualize all of the purchases you’ve made. If you like, you can even export all of your data into your favorite spreadsheet program to sum everything up! Or…

For some spreadsheet-packed dinosaur-themed master-level formjitsu, you can save all of your entries in Wufoo directly into Google Sheets using Zapier. WHAT. Yep, it’s the truth. You can learn a bit more about Zapier’s connection between Wufoo and Google Sheets right over here.

Once you have this connection created, you’ll have a beautiful list of all your expenses saved directly in Google Sheets. This means you can use that information to do calculations, create pivot tables, and learn all sorts of fascinating things about your spending habits. But if you ask me, some things may be better left unseen.

Maybe you’ve received all the entries you need and you’re ready to start digging through your data with a report or you’re done with a major project and you can finally put your form to bed.

Whatever the reason, when you do close your form, there is always a chance a straggler will still attempt to view it. When this happens, they’ll see a little message telling them the form isn’t accepting entries. Depending on if you made the form private or if it hit the entry limit, the message will be different:

Those do the job. They let your user know the form isn’t accepting entries, which may be all you really need to tell them. What if you want to change the message though? Perhaps you want to tell your users the form is closed, but they can get check out your website or you just want to show them a picture of a dinosaur eating pizza.

There’s not a setting that will let you change that message on your form, but as with most things Wufoo, where there’s a will there’s a way. We can keep the form “live” and hide the submit button and all the fields in the form so that the only thing left is a section break with your personal message.

First off, we need to make sure the form is active again. So if the form has hit an entry limit, make sure to reset that or make the form public once again.

After that, we need to make all fields in the form admin only. That way, you hide the fields on your form from everyone but yourself.

Here’s how you do it:

Click the Forms tab at the top of your page.

Click Edit on your form.

Now click on your field and change the Show Field to to Everyone.

Job’s a good’un. Now add a section break field to the form and add your custom message in there. Your form should be looking a bit like this:

All the fields are admin only, which means they won’t show up in the form, but you keep all the data you received from those fields. However, if you view the form, you can still see the submit tab, which looks a bit…rubbish.

We can add some simple custom CSS to get rid of that title, the grey line below it, and the submit button.

That CSS will use “display: none;” to essentially hide the submit button, title and grey line from the form. All that’s left is to apply the finishing touch by enlarging the size of the section break text via the Theme Designer. Put it all together and the final piece should look a bit like this:

You’ve got yourself a custom message for a closed form and a T-Rex with a full belly. Beautiful.

And behold, another post with the most(est) from our expert, Kane. Questions for him? You know where to go!